Wise men are like valuable spice for a story. They are also a wonderful plot device, or an extremely cheesy one, depending on how the character is used and written.

Wise men (and women) are often the moral compass to the main characters, or hold some kind of answer to ...

Therapists are the type of character whose occupation can easily seep into their ‘off the clock’ life. It's not something that can often be helped. Psychologists don't ‘turn off’ their perception of behavioral patterns and personality analyses, the same way you can't ‘unsee’ the rabbits after you ...

I've already written a bunch of articles on writing mental illness, so I figured I should write about writing therapists as well!

Oh, the woes for therapist representation in narrative works! All the stereotypes are there: from the shrink that is actually a little (or a lot) loopy and ...

The word for ‘porn’ in Greek is unsurprisingly ‘porn’. But its vernacular synonym is a word that in reality means ‘tack-on’ or ‘added scrap’. It signifies the common (or at least until recently common) assumption that scenes with explicit sexual activity were there to pad the runtime for a movie ...

So on occasion, there's a lot of controversy over gender bending characters- that is, to change the character's sex from male to female or vice versa.

I'm not going to talk about my take on this controversy. At least not in this article.

What I want to ...

As it has been seen very painfully lately in TV, the best story, with the most excellent buildup and most powerful cast of characters will just collapse if the ending isn't good enough.

A technically happy ending that isn't good enough is not going to cut it- again ...

The lifeblood of your comic is the characters in it. They offer a way for the audience to be invested in the world and contextualise any conflicts that will inevitably occur. So it is important that the characters don’t come across as flat. A flat character is one dimensional ...

I am half way complete with my journey across the United States and I have spent the last week in the small town of Eau Claire, Wisconsin. This is an area of the world that many great creative artists, musicians, and writers that I greatly admire have lived and found ...

Recently I saw a performance of the Muppets' band “The Electric Mayhem” from 2009. Pretty great!

It occurred to me how many years have passed since the heyday of the Muppet Show in the late 1970's. The fact that this young-ish audience was so excited about this show said ...

If you want to design a memorable character it doesn’t just stop at their looks. How they speak, write and use body language is integral to who they are as a person as well as how other character’s may react to them. When you read a comic or ...